Today we are excited to announce the release of Podclass Web Services (PWS), a set of APIs that enable colleges, universities and companies who use online learning management systems to offer their students and instructors access to their courses from within Facebook using the Podclass app.

As of today, PWS works with the learning management system Moodle, which is the largest open-source learning management system used by over 40,000 colleges, universities and companies worldwide. Podclass will be extending PWS to support other learning management systems in the future.

Our developers have been working very hard for on PWS for several months and we are very excited to formally launch this service.

With the launch of PWS, the implications are extraordinary for any learning institution whose students use Facebook. Now any student from a college or university that uses Moodle can now access and manage their course content, connect and collaborate with classmates from inside of Facebook.

Podclass hopes to transform the face of education by enabling students and teachers to access their online courses from ANY social network they want. Currently, Podclass works within Facebook, but we plan to port our Podclass application to work with all of the Google OpenSocial social networks as well, including MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, Friendster, Linkedin, Plaxo and others.

I am proud to announce that Podclass is the recipient of the fbFund grant from Facebook! Our Facebook application Podclass is one of 10 companies chosen as a recipient out of about 1,000 applicants. We are among the first group of companies to receive the fbFund and were featured at Facebook’s f8 held on Wednesday in San Francisco.

Our team has been working very hard to get our Facebook application working with the latest profile changes that Facebook has implemented, as well as improving the application all together.

On Tuesday evening, Facebook had a reception for the fbFund recipients at the Grand Pu Bah and I had the opportunity to meet fellow fbFundees as well as some other nice people from Facebook, Accel Partners and The Founders Fund.

The next day was the f8! Being an fbFund exhibitor was an amazing experience and opportunity for Podclass! Tim Higgs, one of our developers from New Zealand flew out to join me for the f8. Our exhibit booth showed off our new demo video that we’re very proud of as well. We had a universally excellent response from everyone we showed our app to!

Other than Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote and Ben Ling’s presentation, I wasn’t able to attend any of the other sessions because we were manning the booth the entire time.

All of the fbFund recipients had the opportunity to do our “elevator pitch” during the fbFund session moderated by Cat Lee at the end of the conference. Lots of fun!

Tim and I had a great time meeting people, talking about Podclass and hanging out with friends during the after party, where the band Thievery Corporation played.

More to come on the fbFund experience!